Hospitals are tossing out precious coronavirus vaccine doses at the end of the day instead of giving the extra shots to community members, a “maddening” issue that has happened several times at Boston area teaching hospitals, a leading public health expert told the Herald on Monday.
The COVID-19 vax doses with a short shelf life are getting discarded because states have mandates and hospitals feel like they’re not allowed to give the extra shots to nonemployees, said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
Policies that bar nonemployee vaccinations should be repealed as the vaccine rollout gets off to a slow start across the country, he added.
“It’s so incredibly frustrating that they’re literally throwing doses away, and it’s happening in lots of hospitals across the country,” Jha said. “It’s shocking and it’s maddening. … It’s just unacceptable.”
Jha said he has a close friend in a Boston area teaching hospital who has told him about the hospital throwing out doses.
“There have been several occasions at major Boston area teaching hospitals,” Jha said.
Hospitals need to be told there won’t be a penalty for vaccinating someone who’s not a hospital employee, he added. Wasting doses, instead, should trigger a fine.
“They’re nervous to vaccinate community members because they feel like they’ll get in trouble, but we should ensure they’re rewarded for it,” Jha said, adding it’d be easy to set up clinics for those 65-plus with the extra doses.
Providers should have a list of people on standby, who the providers can call up when there are extra doses, said William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious diseases expert.
“An unused dose is a sin,” he said. “You don’t want to waste even a single dose. There’s no need to do that. … Please find some adult to get that vaccine.”
A spokesman for Boston Medical Center said the hospital has not discarded any doses. Tufts Medical Center has not wasted a single dose, a spokesman said.
A Mass General Brigham spokesman said they’re “not aware of any vaccine being discarded at our system.”
If there are extra doses at the end of a day across the Beth Israel Lahey Health system, “we have processes in place to actively recruit eligible staff to receive the vaccine that same day.”
The head of the Massachusetts Medical Society said he hasn’t heard from colleagues or from area hospital leadership about vaccine waste.
“The greatest travesty with a limited resource is to waste it,” said Dr. David Rosman. “Although prioritization is appropriate and a good way to approach it, if a vaccine is about to be wasted, finding a willing arm is absolutely the right thing to do.”
The Bay State last week received new guidance saying that if hospitals and other entities have vaccines beyond what they need for health care workers doing COVID-facing care, they can begin vaccinating any individual who falls into Phase 1 categories.
The Herald on Monday reached out to the Department of Public Health about doses getting discarded, if there would be a policy adjustment, and if DPH has data on discarded doses. The DPH said in a statement, “If hospitals and other facilities have COVID-19 vaccine doses that are either damaged or expired, (they) are required to report them to the Massachusetts Immunization Information System.”
